Tamar Szabó Gendler is certainly one of the wittiest philosophers in the contemporary debate, and at the same time one of the freshest. For proof, simply read The Real Guide to Fake Barns or any other article in the newly published anthology entitled Intuition, Imagination, & Philosophical Methodology, whichbrings together most of her influential work in philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology and psychology of philosophy. It is well worth a read, not only for its accessible style, but also for its content.

The first section deals with thought experiments, in science as well as in philosophy. Szabó Gendler rejects John Norton's account that all thought experiments can be reconstructed into arguments (and thereby replaced) without losing demonstrative force: there is no new knowledge in thought experiments, but old knowledge in an accessible form. Szabó Gendler counters by reevaluating the classical thought experiments by Galileo against the Aristotelian claim that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. She exposes the hidden premises of this argument, premises that have nothing to do with empirical claims, but with the underlying conceptual framework of the Aristotelian, e.g. about what it means to be an object. Then, the reconstruction of the thought experiment can be rejected on conceptual grounds. If the corresponding argument can be rejected, why are the Galilean thought experiments so convincing? Because they confront us with the problems of the conceptual framework underlying the Aristotelian view. Therefore, thought experiments have a unique epistemological standing, which cannot be replaced by actual real-life experiments or reconstruction in the form of arguments. Thought experiments are invitations: as we experiment in our minds, we learn how we would judge; we expose the underlying features "that enable us to negotiate the physical world." That thought experiments actually target underlying conceptual assumptions is what makes them so fruitful for philosophy.

The second part involves three sections all circled around beliefs. Starting with essay on pretense and self-deception, Szabó Gendler later on pushes to the boundaries of the classical understandings of belief and imagination.

Szabó Gendler elucidates why we sometimes writhe to imagine certain cases when they violate our moral intuitions. While we have no problem to take up stories where magic rings and evil orcs exist, where courageous explorers travel faster than light, or where mad scientists go back in time, we somehow have a problem with such cases like: „In killing her baby, Gilda did the right thing. After all, it was a girl." Szabó Gendler calls this phenomenon imaginative resistance. She shows that this difficulty in imagining rests on an unwillingness and not an inability by contrasting it with cases like „In killing her baby, Gilda did the right thing. After all, it was a changeling." While the first raises resistance, the second seems to offer an interesting premise for a story -- the resistance vanishes. This is because the laws of morality are held as background knowledge. We import them into the story, unless they are explicitly cancelled or applied to situations that are sufficiently dissimilar to our own. When we are asked to cancel what we take to be moral truths in non-distorting fiction, we resist. Only if it is obvious that such cancellations are limited to the world of fiction, as in the changeling example, does the resistance vanish. In some cases, we can't imagine, because we won't.

One of Szabó Gendler's main contributions in philosophy of psychology is the well-received distinction between Alief and Belief. The notion of alief refers to a mental state that is representational, affective and directly activates a behavioral response. It shows its strength in situation of belief-behavior mismatch, where deception does not play a role. Consider shrieking in a horror movie. Clearly one does not believe that one is in danger, and neither does one want to deceive somebody else nor oneself. Still, the shriek is an expression of a mental state one has, but this state is not a belief. It is an alief. This concept, introduced in 2008, allows us to analyze such discordance of avowal and behavior in more fine-grained details, sheds new light on automaticity, habits, or implicit biases. However, I still see it as an open question whether alief differs from an enactive understandings of emotions, where the behavior is triggered by the emotion, which clearly is a representational mental state as well.

The intended audience of Intuition, Imagination, & Philosophical Methdology are professional philosophers with background in philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of philosophy. But as the style of Tamar Szabó Gendler is exceptionally accessible, I am certain that every academic reader will benefit from her work: classical psychologists may find her alief/belief distinction helpful, and theoretically inclined literary scholars will find a treasure in her psychological account of imaginative resistance. Beside the content and style, the packaging is done extremely well. All articles have been carefully edited in such a way as to make every change from the pre-published original apparent. I cannot imagine a better overview over Szabó Gendler's work than this -- and not because I won't, but because I truly can't.

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